Did You Declare the Corpse?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Laura found that hilarious. “There we were, tipping double what his work was worth every time he hoisted an extra bag, and all the time that poor old bus driver on his last legs was raking in every penny we spent. Oh, I do like that man!”

  “I want to pop him one, myself.”

  “But who’d have thought he could carry off the deception so long?” She grew serious again. “Speaking of deceptions, have you noticed that while this was billed as a genealogical tour, not one person except you is really exploring their roots? I mean, sure, Sherry toured Eilean Donan Castle, but it obviously wasn’t her first time there, and she’s already done all the research on her family.”

  “And Dorothy got out and looked around at Tain,” I picked up in total agreement, “but she’s more interested in figuring out whether she’s an artist or a librarian than in her great-grandparents.”

  “And if Brandi has a single Scottish ancestor, I’d be surprised,” Laura added.

  I began to nibble one thumbnail. “I would, too. She admitted to me that Jim promised her if she’d come on this trip, he’d let her landscape their gardens when she got home, so my guess is that she was here to provide cover for his real reason for coming.”

  “But why did he need cover? Why sneak in, if what he was doing isn’t illegal?”

  “I’ve been asking myself that question for twenty-four hours, and still don’t have an answer.” I sighed. “But whatever it was, it seems to have caught up with him. Somebody must have found out his secret and wasn’t real happy about it. At first, I thought that could be Norwood—until he got killed, too.”

  “Maybe the laird killed Norwood because he killed the goose with the golden egg.”

  That’s how far we had gotten when somebody downstairs started screaming.

  We both knew it was Sherry. We’d had ample opportunity to memorize those screams on the trip. As I rushed after Laura, I muttered, “If a play in Scotland ever needs a banshee, that woman ought to try out for the part.”

  We clattered down the stairs with Dorothy and Joyce right behind us and Roddy barreling down from the top floor as well.

  Sherry stood in the small back hall dressed in a long black skirt, black socks, and a black turtleneck sweater, exercising her lungs to their fullest capacity.

  Laura hurried to her and caught her arm. “What’s the matter?”

  Sherry opened her eyes long enough to see who it was, shook Laura off and began screaming, “It’s all your fault! It’s all your fault.” She tossed her head in fury and her hair clip went flying. Long ropes of hair slung about her head and shoulders.

  Meanwhile, Eileen’s Lab was hurling himself against her bedroom door with loud hoarse promises to tear us all to shreds as soon as he got out. Roddy dashed from the kitchen and spoke firmly through his mother’s door. “Hush, Chancellor! That’ll be enough.” Eileen and Marcia must have already gone to visit her aunt. The dog subsided to low growls.

  Since Laura wasn’t achieving much, I pushed her aside and shook Sherry hard. “Stop it! Stop that right now! Calm down and tell us what’s the matter.”

  Sherry gasped, then called me several things that could have hurt my feelings if they had been the least bit applicable. Her saliva spattered my face like venom, and she raised her arms with her hands curved like talons, screaming again.

  Roddy shoved me aside, made a circle of his arms, lifted them over her head, and brought them down, binding her own arms to her sides. While he held her, he spoke with a gentleness I’d never have expected from him. “Noo, noo, you dinnae want to go bonkers on us. Calm down, noo. Shhh, calm down. Everything’s gonna be all right. Calm down. Shhh.”

  “Let me go!” She twisted and jerked until I thought he would lose her, but Roddy kept murmuring and held on. At last she grew still. Silence fell like a sledgehammer.

  She began to take deep, sobbing breaths. Rage left her face and she stood like an ice-witch with midnight hair damp and matted across her forehead. Runnels from tears streaked her cheeks.

  “Let’s go sit doon and rest a minute.” Roddy steered her toward the lounge and called over his shoulder, “Could somebody fetch us a cuppa tea in the lounge?”

  “I’ll get it.” I hadn’t noticed Dorothy standing wide-eyed at the kitchen door until she spoke. She turned and hurried inside.

  When Roddy had escorted Sherry safely into the lounge, Joyce spoke from the bottom of the stairs. “I guess I’d better go in with her.” She was no longer the prim, anxious tour guide we’d met ten days before. She was a pale, bedraggled woman with a pink nose and wet lashes.

  I held her back. “Let her catch her breath and get some tea inside her.”

  Dorothy carried a steaming mug to the door and peeped in. Roddy took the mug and kicked the door shut. It closed with a sharp click.

  The Lab whined behind the other door.

  “What was all that about?” Joyce asked, looking from one of us to the other. Her color was coming back and, with it some of her poise. “Does anybody have any idea?”

  “The young policeman was here,” Dorothy said in a tentative voice, like she wasn’t sure she was supposed to be telling, but didn’t like to carry the responsibility for withholding the information. “Roddy and I were in the kitchen playing cards, so I answered the door.”

  I figured Roddy would always let a woman answer the door.

  “He asked to speak to her,” Dorothy went on, “so I fetched her from the lounge. They spoke at the back door, and the next thing we knew she was screaming—eh?” She went to the back door and peered out. “I don’t know what happened to the bobby.”

  “Skedaddled to save his skin,” I suggested.

  “Roddy was real good with her,” Laura said in a surprised voice.

  “Eileen says he’s a way with animals,” Dorothy told us. “She says the bigger and fiercer the better. She thinks he would be good working with a vet—eh? But he can’t seem to make up his mind to get the training he’d need.”

  I was glad to hear that Roddy had one shining talent, should he choose to exercise it, but it sounded to me like Eileen, as well as Marcia, was trying to do a bit of match-making. And why not? Dorothy was pretty, sensible, and employable—just what most mothers of sons pray for.

  In a moment or two, he eased halfway out the door. “Which one of ye is Laura?”

  When she stepped forward, he motioned her in. “Mrs. Boyd would like to speak wi’ ye.”

  As she got closer to the door, he muttered, “Go easy, noo. She’s still not completely calm.”

  She certainly wasn’t. As soon as Laura appeared, she started to yell again, “It’s all your fault! You sent them after him, didn’t you? You’ve landed him in jail, accused of murder, and I’ll be there, too, as soon as he starts spilling his guts. And it’s all your fault! I hope you’re satisfied!”

  I don’t know about the others, but I was having trouble breathing. Kenny arrested for murder?

  Her shouts, of course, set off the dog again. This time I went to the door of Eileen’s room and talked him into a modicum of quiet. We could still hear his growls behind the door, though.

  When things had been silent for a minute or so, Joyce started for the lounge. “I ought to be in there,” she said again.

  I held her back once more. “Roddy can handle her, but I think we should call the doctor. She’ll make herself sick at this rate.”

  “I don’t know about our insurance—” Joyce objected.

  “They have the national health,” Dorothy reminded her. “Shall I call?”

  It was Joyce’s decision, and she shook her head. “Not yet. Maybe the worst is over.”

  The worst over? With Sherry’s husband arrested for murder?

  As if she’d done all the deciding she could for a while, Joyce sank to the bottom step and sat there, her head in her hands.

  We could hear Roddy, murmuring, but Laura still hadn’t come out. The dog whined uneasily behind the door.

  Trying to distract our attention from
the lounge, I told Joyce, “I understand that the second dead man was the laird’s brother-in-law, the one we were both looking for.”

  She nodded, and gave a not-funny little laugh. “I guess he had a good reason for missing rehearsal, huh?” She rubbed her palms on her thighs as if to warm them.

  Laura stepped out of the lounge, a bit strained around the mouth and eyes, and came over to where I was standing. She looked down at me like she used to look up at me when she was little, had gotten herself into trouble, and wanted me to talk to her parents. “I told Sherry you’re good at detecting. She wants to talk to you.”

  Joyce gave me a startled look, as if I’d just developed a second head. “Detecting?”

  “Laura’s exaggerating, honey,” I assured her. I was about as eager to go into that lounge as I used to be to go into Mama’s henhouse when I was six, knowing half the biddies were going to peck me when I robbed their nests and somewhere in the dimness lurked a ferocious rooster with spurs. “I don’t have any legal standing in Scotland,” I reminded Laura. “And the local police are perfectly capable.”

  “I told her you’d try to help.” Laura sounded about six, too, and desperate. “They’ve arrested Kenny. His sgian dubh stabbed the laird’s brother-in-law.”

  I should have warned Laura this could happen, prepared her. Too late now.

  “Has he confessed?” Joyce was trembling. Poor dear, this was worse for her than for the rest of us. She’d put the trip together and been entrusted with getting us to Scotland and back. She already had a murder to deal with. And now she had a murderer? That was more than any tour guide signed on for. Maybe the rest of us ought to write her a testimonial. Not that she’d be likely to want to be a tour guide again, but she could show it when she applied for another job.

  If you wonder why I was standing in that unheated hall thinking about writing testimonials for a trip none of us might survive, it was because my feet weren’t making any tracks toward the lounge door. Laura gave me a shove. “Just go talk to her.”

  “I’ve been listening to her,” I pointed out. “It has not been good for my eardrums.”

  “She won’t scream at you like she did me,” she promised.

  “Can you guarantee that, honey?” However, I am a decent person, and a trained magistrate. If an American woman needed to talk because her husband was accused of murder, I knew I ought to listen—up to a point. “If she starts screaming, I’m out of there,” I warned.

  “Just go,” Laura begged. That got me going. Laura MacDonald never begs. Never. I saw she was struggling to hold back tears, too, and Laura used to never cry. As soon as I turned toward the lounge, she dashed upstairs and I heard our door bang.

  I sure hoped she wasn’t breaking her heart over Kenny Boyd.

  Sherry sat in the same chair she’d occupied earlier, her fiddle case at her feet. “Have you been playing down here all night?” I asked when I got inside the door and closed it behind me.

  Roddy, beside her on the couch, looked surprised at my opening line, but Sherry nodded. “I was thinking of Jim. He was so talented. It’s such a waste.” Her voice was bleak and her eyes turned toward the fire as if those flames had consumed him. Had Kenny killed Jim out of jealousy?

  “What did you want to talk to me about? And I warn you—if you start yelling at me, I am out of here so fast you won’t see the dust from my shoes.”

  “I won’t yell at you.” She sounded so listless I wondered if Dorothy had put something in the tea, but then I saw the mug, virtually full, sitting on the tile curb that surrounded the hearth.

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Laura said you’re a judge, so I thought maybe you could tell me what to do. Kenny’s in the Aberdeen jail.”

  I had opened my mouth to tell her I knew nothing about Scottish law and little enough about criminal law, since that’s not what magistrates do, but she had already gone right on.

  “The policeman think he killed Norwood Hardin because he was killed with Kenny’s sgian dubh and they caught Kenny—caught him—” She began to gasp as if the oxygen had gone from the room.

  “Breathe slowly and talk when you can.” Roddy said quietly. “Shhh. Breathe. Breathe. That’s right. Shhh.”

  Sherry took several deeper breaths, then bent to pick up her mug. She didn’t drink, though, just cradled the mug in her hands, rolling it back and forth between her palms. “Kenny was at the Aberdeen airport, trying to get a plane.”

  “To where?”

  She gave a short laugh. “Who knows where? He was running out on me, is what he was doing. Leaving me holding the whole bag. Bags and bags and bags and bags—”

  She began to laugh, and her laugh was worse than her scream.

  “Shhh,” Roddy told her. “Calm doon. Shhh. It’s going to be all right. Nobody is going to hurt you. I promise. Calm doon.” Still the laughter continued. He threw me a pleading look.

  I headed for the door. “She needs a sedative,” I said firmly. “I’m going to tell Joyce to call the doctor.”

  23

  Joyce and Roddy could greet the doctor. They didn’t need the rest of us around, so I followed Laura up to our room.

  “Okay,” I said, closing the door behind me and not bothering to turn on a light. A soft glow filled the bay window from the rising moon, and I didn’t feel like bright lights at the moment. “Tell me what Kenny and Sherry have been up to.”

  Maybe it was the darkness that made it easier to talk, maybe she felt she owed me a story for the ones I’d told her earlier, or maybe she was finally adequately worried. In any case, she took a seat on her bed and motioned me to sit on mine across from her.

  “The restaurant is going under. They can’t meet current expenses, much less their debt service. They took out a huge mortgage to buy the place, because Sherry’s aunt Rose needed money to finance her retirement in Florida. And neither one of them is good at managing a restaurant. When he realized they faced bankruptcy, Kenny wanted to sell, but instead, Sherry went in cahoots with somebody she knows who makes bogus credit cards. She furnished him with names and card numbers from some of their customers, and in exchange, he made her ten cards they’ve been using on this trip to buy stuff to stock a Scottish gift shop on one of the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean. She was born there, and actually holds dual citizenship. So she flew down last month, rented a shop with an apartment upstairs, and got a business license. Their plan was to abandon the place in Savannah and fly directly to the islands from Atlanta, before charges start showing up on people’s credit ratings.”

  “But that’s stealing, pure and simple,” I protested.

  Laura spoke impatiently. “Kenny knows that, but Sherry doesn’t care, and she has him over a barrel. He persuaded her to cosign a big loan last year to expand the restaurant, so now she says it’s his fault they’re in all this trouble and he’d better do what she says or they’ll lose everything and go to jail.” Her eyes gleamed in the dimness, full of tears. “Kenny’s been worried sick, but he doesn’t know what to do.”

  What worried me was Laura getting so upset about a man like Kenny. Remembering his remark on the plane coming over, I suspected he was far less worried about the morality of the thing than he was about getting caught.

  “So today he came up with an alternative plan.” I had meant to hide the disgust I felt, to keep her talking, but it came out anyway. “Skip out and leave Sherry, as she so delicately put it, holding the bags and bags and bags.”

  Her head came up quickly, and she asked in disbelief, “Is that what she says he did?”

  “Apparently it is what he did. They caught up with him at the Aberdeen airport and now have him in the Aberdeen jail.”

  “But she said they’ve discovered it was his sgian dubh that stabbed the laird’s brother-in-law, so they arrested him.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he killed Norwood Hardin and then ran.”

  She shook her head. “If he was running, it’s my fault, Mac.” Her
voice was rough with pain.

  “How in tarnation could it be your fault?”

  “Last night he asked me for a loan, to get them through the crisis, but this morning I turned him down. I don’t trust Sherry, and Kenny’s not good at standing up to her, so I couldn’t be sure the money would be used to pay their debts.”

  Whatever her sentimental feelings, Laura was, at base, a businesswoman. So am I.

  “Absolutely not,” I agreed. “You’d have been wasting your money. And Kenny’s a grown man, responsible for his own choices and actions, so don’t go beating up on yourself. ”

  I didn’t add that I wouldn’t have trusted Kenny to use the money to pay debts, either. He obviously liked fine things and high living. But if I was going to upset Laura, I’d rather focus on what might have happened than on what hadn’t. “You don’t reckon Kenny asked Jim for a loan later, do you?”